Neither Israel, nor
Palestine: Workers have no country !

Day after day, the list of the dead and
wounded, in Israel and the occupied territories, grows longer.

In a region which has already been
through five out-and-out wars since the end of the second world
slaughter (not counting all the ‘peacetime’ military operations),
a new war is hatching, without being officially started, and has
already killed hundreds of people, especially children and young
people.

Officially, everyone talks about
‘peace’ – the Israeli leaders, the leaders of the Palestinian
Authority, and all the governments of the developed countries,
whether European or American.

In fact, despite all the conferences
that have succeeded each other since last summer (Camp David in July,
Paris on October 4, Sharm-el-Sheikh later on that month) the
situation has got worse and worse: stone-throwing, bomb attacks,
Israelis lynched by Palestinians, the use of live bullets by Israeli
soldiers against Palestinian demonstrators, attacks on civilians
populations by rockets, shells and helicopters.

Depending on which country we live in,
or on which country we live in, or the political colour of the
government, we are being called on to side with one camp or another
in this conflict:

"Defend Israel against the
threat of all these fanatical Arabs who surround the country"

"Support the just cause of the
Palestinians against Israeli atrocities".

But no one is posing the real question:
where are the interests of the working class in all this, whether
Jewish or Arab, whether in Israel or Palestine, or in other
countries?

The
Middle East: war without end

The 20th century has been a century of
wars, the most atrocious wars in human history, and not one of them
has served the interests of the workers. It’s always the workers
who are called upon to go and kill each other in their millions for
the interests of their exploiters, under the banner of ‘defending
the country’, or fighting for ‘civilisation’, ‘democracy’,
or even the ‘socialist fatherland’ (which is how certain people
described the USSR of Stalin and the gulag).

And after these terrible wars,
particularly after the second world war, those who lived through them
were again asked to make new sacrifices to reconstruct the national
(i.e. capitalist) economy.

Today there is a new war in the Middle
East, even if it hasn’t been officially declared.

On both sides, the ruling cliques call
on the workers to ‘defend the country’ whether Jewish or
Palestinian. The Jewish workers, who in Israel are exploited by
Jewish capitalists, the Palestinian workers who are exploited by
Jewish capitalists or Arab capitalists (and often more ferociously by
the latter than by the Jewish capitalists because in the Palestinian
enterprises, working rights are no different from what they were in
the old Ottoman empire).

The Jewish workers have already paid a
heavy tribute to the war madness of the bourgeoisie during the course
of the five wars they have been through since 1948. As soon as they
were taken out of the concentration camps and the ghettos of a Europe
ravaged by world war, the grandparents of those who today wear the
uniform of the Israeli defence Forces were dragged into the war
between Israel and the Arab countries. Then their parents paid the
blood-price in the wars of 67, 73 and 82. These soldiers are not
frightful brutes who think of nothing but killing Palestinian
children. They are young conscripts, most of them workers, constantly
bombarded with propaganda about the ‘barbarity’ of the Arabs and
yet many of them full of doubt and disgust at being forced to act as
cops.

The Palestinian workers have already
paid the blood-price. Kicked out of their homes in a war that their
leaders wanted, they have spent the major part of their lives in
refugee camps, enrolled into the various Palestinian militias (Fatah,
PFLP, Hamas, etc). Frequently they have suffered the worst massacres
not at the hand of the Israeli army but of the armies of the
countries where they were in exile, like Jordan and Lebanon. In
September 1970 (Black September), King Hussein exterminated them en
masse, to the point where some of them had to flee to Israel to
escape death. In September 1982 it was the Arab militias (albeit
Christian, and allied to Israel) who butchered them in the Sabra and
Chatila camps in Lebanon.

Nationalism
and religion: poison for the exploited

Today, in the name of ‘Palestine’,
they want to once again mobilise Arab workers against the Israelis,
the majority of whom are workers, just as the latter are being asked
to get themselves killed for the defence of the ‘Promised Land’,
Eretz Yisroael.

Both sides are being drenched with
nationalist propaganda, which seeks to turn human beings into
ravening beasts. The Israeli and Arab bourgeoisies have been
aggravating these nationalist feelings for more than half a century.
Both Israeli and Arab workers are told that they must defend the land
of their ancestors. With the first, a systematic militarisation of
society has been developed alongside a siege mentality in order to
make everyone into good soldiers. With the second, the idea has been
that if they can settle accounts with Israel, they will ‘get their
land back’. And in order to achieve this, the leaders of the Arab
countries have kept them for decades in concentration camps,
subjecting them to intolerable living conditions and preventing them
from integrating themselves into the ‘host’ country.

Nationalism is one of the worst
ideologies that the bourgeoisie has ever invented. It makes it
possible for the ruling class to hide the antagonisms between
exploiters and the exploited, to rally them all behind the same flag,
to get the exploited to sacrifice themselves for the sake of their
exploiters.

And to cap it all, this war is also
being fuelled by the poison of religious propaganda, which leads to
the development of the most irrational forms of fanaticism. The Jews
are called upon to defend the Wailing Wall, the remains of Solomon’s
Temple. The Muslims are told to give their lives for the Mosque of
Omar and the holy places of Islam. What is happening today in Israel
and Palestine clearly confirms what revolutionaries said last
century: religion is the opium of the people. Its aim is to console
the exploited and the oppressed. Those whose lives on earth is a hell
are told that they will be happy after their deaths as long as they
know how to find salvation. And the road to salvation passes through
sacrifice, submission, and offering your life for the ‘holy war’

The fact that, at the beginning of the
21st century, ideologies and superstitions that go back to antiquity
or the Middle Ages are still being stirred up in abundance in order
to get human beings to sacrifice their lives says a great deal about
the depth of the barbarism stalking the Middle East and many other
parts of the world.

The great
powers are responsible for the war

As for the ‘developed’ countries,
the ‘great democracies’ of Europe and the USA, which are today so
keen to announce their compassion for the suffering of the people in
the Middle East, their revolting hypocrisy deserves to be denounced
from beginning to end.

It is the leaders of these same powers
which have created the infernal situation facing the exploited of
this region.

It was the European bourgeoisies,
particularly the English bourgeoisie with its Balfour declaration in
1917, which, with its policy of divide and rule, permitted the
formation of a "Jewish Homeland" in Palestine, opening the
door to the chauvinist utopia of Zionism. It was the same
bourgeoisies who, at the end of the second world war, arranged for
the transportation to Palestine of hundreds of thousands of Jewish
refugees and concentration camp victims. This made sure that all
these refugees were kept well away from their countries. It was the
same bourgeoisies, first the British and the French, then the
American, who armed the state of Israel to the teeth in order to make
it the spearhead of the western bloc in the region during the cold
war. The USSR, on the other hand, poured weapons into its Arab
allies. Without these big ‘patrons’, the wars of 1956, 67, 73 and
82 wouldn’t have been able to take place.

With the collapse of the eastern bloc
we were promised a new era of peace. This lie was immediately exposed
by the Gulf war in 1991. But after that, illusions about peace were
spread far and wide by the politicians and the media. It was the
period of the Madrid conference of October 91 and the ‘Oslo
accords’ signed at the White House in September 1993.

But there can be no peace in
capitalism. This was demonstrated by the horrible massacres going on
in Yugoslavia at the same moment. As for the Middle East, peace meant
a ‘Pax Americana’, a still more powerful presence of the US in
the region. This is something that the other bourgeoisies did not
want at a time when the disappearance of the ‘Soviet’ threat was
leading them to affirm their own imperialist ambitions.

Today all the bourgeoisies claim they
want peace. What they really want is to get their foot in the door,
or strengthen further their position in the Middle East, one of the
most coveted regions of the world because of its economic and
strategic importance.

To end war, you have to end capitalism

This is why, in the conflict between
Israel and Palestine, we find the US backing Israel while other
powers, such as France (as we saw at the Paris meeting in October)
are lining up behind the Palestinians.

Even after the disappearance of the
USSR, the great powers are there to throw oil on the fire, as they
have been doing in Yugoslavia over the past 10 years.

This is also why the workers of these
countries, the ‘great democracies’, whose leaders talk about
nothing but ‘peace’ and ‘human rights’, must refuse to take
sides with either camp. Above all they must refuse to be taken in by
the speeches of those parties which claim to be part of the working
class – the parties of the left and the extreme left, who are
calling on workers to show their ‘solidarity with the Palestinian
masses’, to support their ‘right to a homeland’. A Palestinian
homeland will never be anything but a bourgeois state in the service
of the exploiters, oppressing the same Palestinian masses with its
police and its prisons. The solidarity of the workers of the most
advanced capitalist countries does not go out to the ‘Palestinians’
or to the ‘Israelis’, among whom you will find both exploiters
and exploited. It goes out to the workers and the unemployed of
Israel and of Palestine, who have their own struggles against their
exploiters despite the constant brainwashing they are subjected to,
as it goes out to the workers of all other countries. And showing
solidarity certainly doesn’t consist in encouraging their
nationalist illusions.

This solidarity means above all
developing their own struggle against their own bourgeoisies, against
the capitalist system which is responsible for all wars.

In the Middle East as in many other
regions of the world ravaged by war today, there is no ‘lasting
peace’ possible under capitalism. Even if the present crisis is not
leading to an open war, even if the different protagonists arrive at
some temporary truce, this region will remain a powderkeg ready to
explode.

Peace can only be won when the working
class overthrows capitalism on a world scale. And the working class
can only move in that direction by developing its struggles on its
own class terrain, against the increasingly brutal economic attacks
demanded by the insurmountable crisis of the system.

Against nationalism, against the wars
our exploiters want to drag us into: